BBC Covers UVM Discovery: Tweeters are Happier Further From Home

The BBC -- as well as MIT Technology Review and numerous other media outlets -- report that a UVM team demonstrated the further a Twitter user strays from their “average” locations, the “happier” their tweets become. According to the BBC, Christopher Danforth, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, and his team first created an algorithm to search public tweets for positive and negative terms. When the team indexed 37 million messages from 180,000 GPS- enabled phones worldwide, they found that the distance tweeters were from their two average locations (home and work) the fewer negative terms their tweets contained. The BBC writes that this team is on the forefront of a revolution in research techniques for the social sciences, driven by such extensive social media data. Read the story...